Director of National Research @EdChoice, high-five aficionado. All thoughts on here are my own. Just warning, some of those thoughts will be better than others.
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Articles by Mike McShane
Applications Are Up: Tracking The Growth Of Private School Choice Programs
Across the country, private school choice programs are processing applications for next school year. Some application windows have closed and some remain open, but one fact is clear, private school choice is growing. Private school choice programs take several forms. Traditionally, states created voucher programs, which provide a state-funded scholarship for students to attend private school.
A New Flashpoint For School Choice Policy: Accreditation
Private schools have sought accreditation for more than a century. Organizations like the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and North Central Association of Colleges and Schools were founded in the late 19th century to both serve as a quality control mechanism for the growing number of schools across the country as well as a means to share new ideas and practices.
The New Frontier Of School Choice: Zoning
Florida has made itself the epicenter of private school choice in America. This year, more than 500,000 students will participate in one of the state’s private school choice programs. Given that there are around 1.2 millionstudents in the nation utilizing a school choice program total, Florida’s place is a prominent one. But lurking under the surface are local restrictions that make it much harder for new schools to open to serve the growing population of private school students.
New School Models Embrace Smaller Size
It is tough to understate just how central a role scale has played in education reform. Starting more than a century ago, reformers looked to scale up schools, inventing institutions like the comprehensive high school to centralize student populations and broaden the offerings available to them. In this century, movements towards statewide teacher evaluation systems or even nationwide educational standards were massive in scale. Scale has been a part of the school choice movement as well.
These Three Schools Are Preparing Teachers For Classical Education
In 2024, Arcadia Education estimated that more than 675,000 students attended classical K-12 schools in America with enrollment growing at 4.8% per year. In a world where many school sectors are worried about contraction, this is a shockingly high rate of expansion. Classical education, according to the University of Dallas, “is a holistic approach to learning that seeks the flourishing of its students in mind, body, and soul.
How One School Reweaves Social Fabric To Advance Workforce Development
In workforce development, there are buzzwords that pop up in nearly every conversation. Industry credentials. Or even better, stackable industry credentials. Soft Skills. Self-paced. Work-based learning. But what if the real buzzwords are healing and hope? In speaking with leaders from Oakmont Education, a school network educating more than 5,000 students across 18 campuses in Ohio and Iowa, it is clear that before students can get the what of workforce development, they need to cultivate the why.
Understanding The Results From Three School Choice Referenda
Let’s talk about the election results that really matter: The outcome of the three school choice referenda in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska. Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Perhaps the story from yesterday is that all winning campaigns are alike; each losing campaign loses in its own way. Colorado Colorado voters were asked if they wanted to amend the state constitution to establish a right to school choice.
Why Do Parents Homeschool?
According to research from Johns Hopkins University, approximately 5% of American school children are homeschooled. That is just a few points shy of the number of students who attend charter schools and a little more than half the number of those who attend private schools. While this is down from pandemic-era highs (where enrollment is thought to have peaked at 11% of American students), we are still near a doubling of the number of students who were homeschooled pre-pandemic.
Bernie Sanders Is Wrong About School Choice
In his capacity as Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee, Senator Bernie Sanders has released a 20-page broadside against school choice. While that in and of itself is not exactly newsworthy (states generally administer school choice programs, not the federal government), it is a useful document to understand the evolving playbook of anti-school choice advocates. The playbook is changing because their arguments aren’t working.
Private Schools: Keep Them Private
In 1997, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman penned a short article for the academic journal Education Economics titled “Public Schools: Make Them Private.” In 2024, we might need to reformulate the expression to say, “Private Schools: Keep Them Private.” Friedman argued that America should create a voucher system whereby the centrally managed apparatus of public education would be replaced by free parent choice of independent schools.
Education Savings Account Uptake And The Diffusion Of Innovations
New data from Arizona’s Universal Education Savings Account program has been released, and Mount Hot Take is already erupting. In a short paper published by the Brookings Institution, with the not-at-all incendiary title “Arizona’s ‘universal’ education savings account program has become a handout to the wealthy,” researchers combed through data on the zip codes of participating students and identified that they are coming from wealthier and better-educated parts of the state.
Learning More About School Choice
2024 is not shaping up to be as big of a legislative year for school choice as 2023. While Alabama did pass a universal ESA program, Missouri expanded its tax credit funded ESA program, and efforts are afoot in Louisiana to go big on a school choice bill, the clock is running out. This gives us an opportunity for some introspection. What do we know about the schools that students might choose if a state were to create such a program?
Is More Flexibility The Solution To Teacher Burnout?
Teachers are unhappy. We use responses to our national teacher poll to calculate a for the profession. In September of 2023, it was at the lowest level we’ve recorded (-37). In that same poll, 47% of teachers under 55 and 49% of teachers over 55 told us that they were considering leaving the profession. The percentage of teachers telling us that the education system is heading in the right direction also hit an all-time low.
Rick Hess and Mike McShane: Education is a Handshake | Independent Women's Forum
In their new book, Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College, Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane outline a principled conservative vision that could cultivate schools that are formative, flexible, and human. In this supersized Students Over Systems episode, Rick and Mike encourage conservatives to advocate for local control, tradition, and opportunity while avoiding the lure of The Next Big Thing in technocratic K-12 education policy.
What To Make Of Fraud In ESA Programs
Last week, a grand jury indicted five former employees of the Arizona Department of Education for defrauding the state of at least $600,000. According to the Arizona Republic, they are accused of using fake birth certificates and other falsified documents to create “ghost students” in the state’s education savings account program and then pocketing the funding that those fake students were due to receive. Unfortunately, fraud in education is not new.
The Housing Theory Of Everything Comes For Education
The starting salary for a fully credentialed teacher in San Francisco is $66,918. Sounds pretty good. And it is, anywhere other than San Francisco. The problem is that the average two-bedroom apartment in that city costs $3,840 per month, meaning if a new teacher decided to get a roommate and move in to an average apartment, he or she would still shell out $1,920 per month.
Is It School Choice Or School’s Choice?
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Is It School Choice Or School’s Choice?
It was National School Choice Week last week. According to organizers, over 27,000 events were held across the country, with 29 states issuing proclamations and 30 monuments being illuminated in colors marking the occasion. Yellow scarves flew from East to West, North to South. Never ones to miss an opportunity, choice opponents mounted a series of attacks on social media, one of which is worth taking a few words to unpack.
Surface-Enhanced Spatially Offset Raman Spectroscopy in Tissue
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Education Trends To Watch In 2024
It’s not a new school year, but it is a new calendar year. When it comes to education in America, there are four trends that I’m particularly going to have my eye on in 2024. Each, I think, will have serious ramifications for the education system and the children that are educated by it. These are not the flash in the pan stories that grab headlines for a few weeks or a few months, but enduring and serious topics that will shape schooling in America for this year, and potentially beyond.
Oh, What A Year (For School Choice)
At the Linebacker Lounge, across from Notre Dame stadium in South Bend, Indiana, the bar staff signal last call (or at least did a decade ago when I was last there) by playing Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ “December 1963 (Oh What a Night)” Oh, what a night Late December back in sixty-three What a very special time for me As I remember, what a night Looking back on the progress that private school choice programs made in 2023, we might be able to rework the lyrics: Oh, what a year,...
Great Education Writing From 2023
I’m not sure how many times you have to do something for it to become a tradition, but last year I decided to highlight great things I read in 2022, and readers seemed to enjoy it, so I wanted to do it again this year. There was a lot of great reporting and great commentary in education (and adjacent to education in useful and interesting ways), but I narrowed it down to five pieces. Obviously, that means a lot of great stuff did not make the list. C’est la vie.
A Note On Optimism, Gratitude, And Giving Thanks
Thanksgiving is a hard day for an American expatriate. It is such a central American holiday that it is jarring to be somewhere where everyone is simply going about their business on the fourth Thursday of November. But giving thanks knows no borders or calendars, and even though I’ll be the only one around taking the day off, I will take time to be grateful, especially because gratitude seems to be in short supply, both here and back at home.
What The Failure Of Island’s Edge Can Tell Us About School Choice
There is overconfidence and then there is overconfidence. The invasion of Gallipoli, the Cincinnati Subway, the Mondale campaign, all featured high hopes and an inflated sense of superiority and all ended in crushing failure. Well, we can add one more to the list, and we can learn a good lesson from it. Heineken Ireland has decided to discontinue Island’s Edge, the stout beer it launched in 2021 to challenge Guinness.
Single-Sex Education: Putting The Arguments On The Table Original
When teaching classes on education policy, I usually begin with a joke about people’s reaction to finding out that I got my Ph.D. in it. If I had instead studied biology or history, I posit, I imagine that people would ask me questions about something that was in the news, maybe about an E. Coli outbreak or a statue they saw on vacation.
New Teachers For New Schools
New school models including microschools, hybrid homeschools, and the like have been hard to miss lately. Whether it was The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or even Good Morning America, they are clearly having their day in the sun. So many interesting and exciting things are happening. Schools are experimenting with new schedules and calendars, delivery mechanisms, and organizational structures.
Microschools can help students with special learning needs
Last week, the Washington Post published a long feature on the growing microschool and homeschool-adjacent learning environments that have cropped up across the country in the past few years. One image from the article will linger with me for some time. It shows 12-year-old Logan Shea sitting on a step, drinking a bottle of water, wearing a banana costume. Logan is on the Autism spectrum, and according to his mother was frequently bullied and isolated in his old public school.
School Safety, School Choice, And More From The Schooling In America Survey
Seventy-seven percent of American school parents are concerned that a violent intruder could enter their child’s school. That is the most stunning of many interesting results from EdChoice’s 11th Annual Schooling in America Survey. Conducted both by telephone and online from April 18th to May 2nd, 2023, the poll surveyed 1,224 members of the general American public and 1,504 school parents. School safety loomed large.
Summer Education Research Roundup Original
Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Books and sunglasses on beach background getty School is out for summer. Legislative sessions have wrapped up. It is a slow time for the education policy beat. But a lack of action in schools and state capitols leaves time to do some deep reading. I’ve happened across three studies recently that piqued my interest and think might be worth checking out if you have a few hours on a lazy summer day.
The School Choice Movement Needs To Get Boring
I was in Washington, DC last week teaching at the American Enterprise Institute’s Summer Honors Program and met up with an old friend for a beer. He generally follows my work, and as a teacher, the school choice movement in general.
Private and Charter School Teachers Are Thriving Original
LOUISVILLE, KY - JANUARY 11: Sumer Smith, an elementary school teacher, speaks to her students ... [+] virtually during a period of Non-Traditional Instruction (NTI) at Hazelwood Elementary School on January 11, 2022 in Louisville, Kentucky. Jefferson County Public Schools, along with many other school districts in the US, have switched to NTI in response to severe staffing shortages caused by the prevalence of the omicron variant of COVID-19.
Democratizing School Choice Original
Geometric illustration of multi coloured human figures getty The great scholar of deregulation and later Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told a (possibly apocryphal) story of the late Senator Ted Kennedy. During the 1970s, Kennedy held numerous hearings about deregulating the airline industry, a cause supported by everyone from Ralph Nader to Milton Friedman. Kennedy, the story goes, was approached by one of his Boston constituents and asked, “Why are you holding hearings about airlines?
Hybrid Schooling, Taylor Swift, And Last Storm Problems Original
NEW ORLEANS - SEPTEMBER 20: U.S. President George W. Bush (C) walks with U.S. Army Lt. General ... [+] Russel Honore (L) and U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen on the flight deck of the USS Iwo Jima September 20, 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana. President Bush traveled to the Gulf Cosat to survey damage from Hurrican Katrina as rescue efforts and clean up continue in the areas hit by the deadly storm over three weeks ago.
Listening To Educational Entrepreneurs
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Listening To Educational Entrepreneurs
Children with rucksacks jumping in the park near school. getty The pandemic and its aftermath has created more fertile ground for educational entrepreneurship than perhaps any other sequence of events in my lifetime. Millions of parents across the country became frustrated and disillusioned with their child’s school and started to look for something better.
An Early Look At Microschooling In America
This Small City in California was just Named One of the Best Places to Live in America
An Early Look At Microschooling In America
Let's learn something new today getty Earlier today, the National Microschooling Center released a new report on microschooling in America based on a survey of 100 current and 100 potential microschool leaders. It paints a fascinating portrait of an emerging sector of the education system at a critical juncture in its history. By all accounts, microschooling is growing in America. Networks like Prenda, Kaipod, Acton Academies, and Wildflower are expanding across the country.
School Choice’s Undeniable Momentum
Becky Elder, who helped found the Northfield School of the Liberal Arts in Wichita, Kansas, speaks ... [+] to a rally for school "choice" proposals with conservative GOP legislators pushing to give tax dollars to parents so that they can use the money to cover private and home schooling costs, Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2023, at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan..
Catholic Schools And The Fabric Of American Education
Cardinals Joseph E. Ritter (L) and J. Francis McIntyre attending Conclave of Cardinals to elect new ... [+] Pope. (Photo by David Lees/Getty Images) Getty Images In the fall of 1947 Archbishop (later Cardinal) Joseph Ritter looked at the Catholic schools of St. Louis and said that “The cross on top of our schools must mean something: The equality of every soul before Almighty God,” thus ordering the city’s schools to desegregate.
A Chance For Education Compromise In Arkansas?
Sarah Huckabee Sanders talks at a news conference at the state Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., ... [+] Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023, about an education reform bill she's proposing that includes an increase in starting teacher pay and a voucher-like program allowing public money to pay for private schooling. (AP Photo/Andrew DeMillo) Associated Press It is a common lament that American politicians no longer compromise.
Great Hearts Launches Online National Academy
UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1999: Roman civilization, 1st century A.D. Marble head of Aristotle (alabaster ... [+] bust is modern). Copy of a Greek bronze original by Lysippus, 4th century b.C. (Photo By DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini via Getty Images) De Agostini via Getty Images Great Hearts is one of, if not the, largest providers of classical education in America today.
Legibility, New Education Options, And John O’Donovan Original
From 1829 to 1846 a team of British cartographers created a world first: a complete ordnance map of a country. It was a monumental undertaking. Led by Thomas Colby, engineers from the Royal Sappers and Miners used what were at the time cutting edge triangulation techniques to accurately measure and record the entirety of the island of Ireland at a six inch to one mile scale. If you are a map geek like me, Ordnance Survey Ireland has digitized those records and you can search them all here.
Dispatches From The Land Of Luxury Beliefs
Mark Penn on DeSantis 2024 With the start of the new year, state legislatures across the country are beginning their work. Most will run though the spring and wrap up just before summertime. School choice has been high on the priority list in several different states. Iowa has already passed and signed into law one of the and Utah followed in quick succession.
Dispatches From The Land Of Luxury Beliefs
A recent NBC poll revealed that 71% of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. This is a significant increase from previous polls and suggests a growing sense of unease among the American public. 14 HOURS AGO
Rethinking Access Original
Here is a little experiment. Go to any kind of educational convening; a conference, a professional development seminar, a research presentation, whatever, and say that you believe we should “increase access” in our education system. Then ask whomever you are taking to, “When you heard me say ‘increase access’ who did you think I was talking about?
Five Great Reads From 2022
One of the great joys of my job is that I am able to spend a large amount of my time reading. Whether it is short form or long form, about education or not, I try to be as omnivorous as I can in my consumption of the written word. I read a few great books in 2022. While I was late to the show, Maggie Farrell’s Hamnet lived up to its billing. Punters, by Aaron Rogan was super interesting and any American trying to understand the trajectory of the gambling industry would get a lot from reading it.
The School Politics Paradox Original
Recent news coverage of the relationship between politics and public schools has become downright martial. Schools have become “the focal point for culture war fights.” Stories have headlines like “Your Kid’s School is a Midterm Battleground” and “ School Board Elections have Become the New Battleground.” Battles and fights and skirmishes, oh my. Schools are political entities governed by elected school boards that allot hundreds of billions of tax dollars. Politics are part and parcel of that.
A Crypto Warning From The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Original
In the aftermath of the collapse of FTX, the multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency exchange, it was announced that the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan could lose up to $95 million from its investments in both the US and International FTX entities. Understood correctly, this should serve as a warning about how we fund teachers’ retirement benefits. It is a splashy story about a very not splashy subject. But the implications are immense.
Three Quick Education Takeaways From The Wave Election That Wasn’t Original
Tens of millions of Americans took to the voting booth yesterday to let their voices be heard in the midterm elections. At press time it looks like Republicans will win control of the House of Representatives with a slim majority and the Senate will have a narrow majority one way or the other, making legislating next to impossible. America is in for two years of divided government.
Change Or Continuity? What Education Polling Can Tell Us.
On Tuesday, November 8th Americans will head to the polls to elect 435 congressional representatives, 35 senators, and 36 governors. According to our polling at EdChoice, education issues are tied for fifth in importance for voters in both state and local elections, trailing economic issues, women’s issues, health care issues, and security issues.
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